I'll Be Watching You

by M. William Phelps

  Jackie explained this to Malave, who couldn’t sit idle. He had to do something.

  So he walked down to Kenney’s to see if anyone “knew what might have happened to Carmen.” The first person he ran into was “the guy who watches the cars outside [the bar].”

  “The last time I saw Carmen,” the guy—whom they all called “John the Security Guard”—told Malave, “was the night she left with that guy Ned.”

  “Ned?” Malave asked.

  “Yeah. I saw Carmen get into Ned’s car and they drove down Lawrence Street, away from Capitol Avenue.”

  “How was Carmen?”

  “She seemed really drunk. Ned was kind of holding her up as they walked.”

  “Who’s Ned?”

  “He’s a regular. Here all the time. The bartender knows him. Ask Paula.”

  Malave found Paula, who knew Carmen and Jackie. “Ned’s a regular,” she confirmed. “He comes in almost every day.”

  “Have you seen him lately?”

  “Not since Carmen’s been gone.”

  “Thanks,” Malave said as he started for the door. But he stopped just before walking out. “Hey, Paula,” he said, “give me or Jackie a call the next time you see Ned.”

  Paula promised she would.

  II

  Several days later, Paula called Jackie. It was 8:00 P.M. Malave was with Jackie, consoling her. “Ned’s here,” Paula said.

  “He’s there?”

  “Yeah.”

  Jackie hung up, immediately called the Hartford PD, and explained Ned was at Kenney’s. They needed to get down there at once and talk to him about Carmen, she insisted. If he was the last person with Carmen, he may be able to tell them where she went. Perhaps he’d given her a ride?

  By the time Jackie got off the phone with the Hartford PD, Miguel was leading them to Kenney’s, hoping, of course, to talk to Ned. Miguel wasn’t giving up—especially since he and Jackie had gotten what could be called a substantial lead in hearing that Ned was the last person to be seen with Carmen. An average-size man, Miguel was not someone many people tangled with. He was calm, quite friendly, and not someone to go around looking for trouble. Still, I’m going to beat his ass, Miguel thought as he stomped his way toward Kenney’s.

  Miguel ran into John the Security Guard, whom Malave had spoken to. He asked him about Carmen. “She left with Ned, a white guy. He hasn’t been in here since Carmen turned up missing.”

  Miguel and John were standing by Kenney’s front door. Jackie, Cutie, and Malave were standing by the road, waiting for Miguel to finish. As Miguel talked, John spied Ned inside the bar walking toward them. “That’s him right there.”

  “That’s him?” Miguel asked.

  “Yup.”

  Trying to be sly, Ned walked up to Miguel and stuck out his hand.

  The nerve of this guy.

  Miguel refused.

  Ned turned and walked back into the bar hurriedly after seeing Jackie, Malave, and Cutie walking toward him. He sensed some hostility.

  John walked down the block a ways, heading toward the side of the building, while Miguel and the others stood by the front door and waited. They didn’t want to lose sight of Ned. They kind of had him cornered now: whichever door he came out of, someone would be there. It was clear Ned was trying to get away.

  “Miguel…,” John yelled, “Ned’s leaving. He’s running down Lawrence Street.”

  Ned had walked back into the bar and slipped out the side door before anyone saw him.

  But Miguel took off running and caught Ned as he was just about to get into his car. “I want to talk to you,” Miguel shouted.

  “About what?”

  “You got my wife,” Miguel insisted, although “wife” was more of a term of endearment. “I want her back.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ned said, dropping his head.

  “Where is she?” Miguel screamed.

  “I dropped her off at the gas station on Capitol and Broad.”

  “Bullcrap! I know you got her.” Miguel was ready to pummel Ned.

  Ned began to mumble. He seemed disoriented.

  Alarmed.

  Scared.

  As much as Ned had been involved in violence against women throughout his life, and felt he could wrestle with the best of his peers, he hated confrontation.

  “I…I…I took her to eat at New Britain [Avenue] and Broad Street,” Ned said, changing his story.

  Jackie and the others arrived at Ned’s car, out of breath. “Where’s my mom?” Jackie said quite firmly. There was a tickle of scratchiness in her voice: anger mixed with sadness.

  Ned put his head down, Jackie later said. Then, in a low voice, he said, “Oh, that was your mom? I’m sorry.” As he said it, however, Ned took off again toward the side entrance of the bar.

  “Hey,” Miguel shouted.

  They ran after him as Malave screamed, “Hey, we just want to talk to you.”

  Ned quickly slipped back into the bar through a side entrance, saying frantically, “There’s some people out there that are going to get me.”

  The owner walked over. “What are you talking about?”

  “There’s people out there—”

  “Who? Who is going to get you?”

  The bar owner went for the door and opened it. He saw Jackie and the others running toward the door. Stopping them, he said, “Whoa, what’s the problem here?”

  Shouts and mumbles. No one made sense.

  “Let’s go into the bar and sit down and figure this out,” the owner said.

  “We want him,” Malave said, “to call the police and contact the police about Carmen. He seen her.”

  After a moment, Cutie, Miguel, Jackie, and Malave rushed into the bar, past the owner. When they got inside, Ned was pacing between two pool tables. He looked nervous. More frightened than ever. He had something in his hand he was holding up—waving—in the air. “I’ll pay fifty dollars to anyone who takes these people out of here,” Ned shouted. Panicked, he was sweating, pacing, looking around the bar, hoping someone would take him up on his offer.

  According to Jackie, two men “stepped up and blocked us from going into the bar area,” where Ned had wandered. “Come on,” Jackie said to them, “I need to talk to him,” pointing.

  The bar owner quickly stepped in between them. This gave Ned a sense of “relief,” Malave later explained. The owner wanted to know what was going on.

  “We’re just trying to ask Ned a few questions,” Malave said.

  “Ned, sit down over there,” the manager explained. “Get him a drink on me,” he shouted to the bartender, asking Malave to sit down across from Ned.

  Talk it out. No trouble in here, he warned.

  Jackie, Cutie, and Miguel stood behind Malave and stared at Ned.

  60

  I

  “Do you know Carmen Rodriguez?” Malave asked Ned as they sat down. Malave sounded unthreatening. Calm. They were looking for Carmen. They were worried about her. They weren’t accusing Ned of anything.

  Well, maybe they were.

  Ned stumbled with his words, appearing not to answer the question. Then he broke into a garbled rant, saying, “The…the…last time I saw her was the night I gave her a ride home. I…drove her up Lawrence to Russ…she asked me…she…” He looked around the bar. He wouldn’t look Malave in the eyes. “She asked me for money, twenty dollars, so I told her to get out of my car.” According to Ned, when he told Carmen to get out, she asked him to drop her off at her apartment.

  Ned looked at Malave. Miguel, Jackie, and Cutie were impatient. Miguel started screaming, so Cutie walked him out of the bar.

  “I told her no,” Ned said, talking about the point at which Carmen asked him for money. “I told her to get out of my car ‘now,’” adding that after Carmen asked him for money, he took a hard left on Russ Street and stopped on the corner of Broad, about one block away from a Shell gas station. Once there, he told her to “get out.”

  Police later found t
his to be suspicious: Carmen lived in the opposite direction, several blocks away. Additionally, Ned had said only moments prior to this that he had taken Carmen to eat at a diner and left her there.

  Which was it? Malave was confused. “Do you know where Carmen lives?” he asked.

  Ned shook his head no. Then, “She told me she did not want to go home.”

  At first, Ned had said Carmen asked him for a ride home, but now he was saying she didn’t want to go home. Besides, as Ned spoke, Malave noticed his hands: he was shaking like an alcoholic, sweating more and more as the conversation continued.

  Jackie, too, was visibly upset. She wouldn’t say much.

  “I’m sorry Carmen disappeared,” Ned said, looking at Jackie, “I’m sorry.”

  “Give me your telephone number so the detective who’s in charge can call you.”

  Ned took a napkin and wrote a number on it. He slid it across the table toward Malave. “Call Nick (the bar owner) if you need anything more,” he said. “He can get hold of me.”

  Jackie, Malave, and Cutie left.

  When Jackie got home, she called one of the detectives and told him what had happened. The following day, the detective called back and told her that the number Ned gave to the bar owner was “not a working number…but the bartender knew where Ned works,” the detective explained, “which will help us find him.”

  II

  It was clear to members of the Hartford PD that the disappearance of Carmen Rodriguez was more than an adult taking off and not telling anyone where she had gone. Add Ned Snelgrove into the mix, with his track record of assaulting and murdering women, and the seeds of a more sinister plot seemed to emerge. Thus, in light of the new revelation that Ned was admittedly the last person to see Carmen, a detective was brought into the case. Luisa St. Pierre was a seasoned cop with the HPD and had strong ties in the Hispanic community. She had seen the missing persons file on Carmen and asked around, but she wasn’t able to come up with anything. At the time Carmen’s case crossed paths with St. Pierre, she and several colleagues had been working on an ongoing serial killer investigation known as the “Asylum Hill Killer.” The Asylum Hill neighborhood, where the murders had been occurring, was a half mile—maybe ten city blocks—from Kenney’s. More than a dozen prostitutes had been savagely beaten about the face and body, strangled, and left naked and unrecognizable in different areas of the Asylum Hill section of the city. All the victims had been placed—it seemed strategically—inside a small neighborhood. They were brutally savage crimes.

  As St. Pierre began investigating Carmen’s disappearance, the questions in front of her became: Had the “Asylum Hill Killer” snatched Carmen and, like all of his victims, dumped her body in an abandoned building, warehouse, alleyway, or parking lot somewhere? What’s more, was Ned the “Asylum Hill Killer”?

  But then the questions turned into: If Carmen was part of the Asylum victim pool, where was she? All of the Asylum victims had been left out in the open, their bodies riddled with the signature marks of his vicious rape and murder techniques. The killer’s DNA had been left on many of the victims. To St. Pierre, maybe the Rodriguez missing persons case was going to finally lead the Hartford PD to catch the most notorious serial killer the city had ever seen.

  III

  For most of her adult life, Luisa St. Pierre lived in East Hartford, a small blue-collar city just across the river from the Hartford PD. When St. Pierre took a look at Ned and studied his background in New Jersey, she found it interesting that he had chosen Carmen as his next victim—if, indeed, Ned had had something to do with her disappearance. “Those two victims in New Jersey,” St. Pierre told me, reflecting back on Mary Ellen Renard and Karen Osmun, “were professional, working women. Whereas Carmen was a lost soul.”

  To St. Pierre, there wasn’t a connection. The pattern didn’t match.

  Part of it was that Carmen, although not a prostitute, fit into the MO of the “Asylum Hill Killer,” more than Ned’s, and could have certainly been confused to be a prostitute by the “Asylum Hill Killer” because of the women she hung around with at times. Of course, St. Pierre had no idea at this point that Ned had spent ten years in prison studying Ted Bundy’s behavior, and that Carmen fit into Bundy’s choice of “vulnerable” potential victims.

  Indeed, Ned had gone from a professional-looking Hewlett-Packard salesman in the 1980s to an ex-con with a massive tumor growth on the side of his neck. In some respects, he fit in with the crowd that hung in the neighborhood around Kenney’s: men and women beaten down by the system, tired and poor, living day to day, hand to mouth.

  Although he’d never admit it, Ned might have been acting under the pretense that he was now fashioning himself after Bundy, but instead, without realizing it, he had become one of the crowd he had tried to infiltrate.

  Save for that one day when Jackie, Cutie, Miguel, and Malave ran into Ned at Kenney’s, Ned had stayed clear of the place. If not because he was being suspected of having had something to do with Carmen’s disappearance, he was terrified that he was going to be beaten by Miguel if he ever showed his face in the bar again.

  IV

  By the first week of October, St. Pierre and Detective Harry Garcia, her partner, spoke to a few people at Kenney’s and figured out that Ned worked for American Frozen Foods, located in Stratford, Connecticut, an hour’s drive south of Hartford, and was basically running American’s satellite office in Wethersfield, a town in between Hartford and Berlin. There was still no word from Carmen. Although her body hadn’t been found, her disappearance was now an open investigation, a possible homicide.

  During the afternoon of October 16, things got interesting for Garcia and St. Pierre. Garcia received a call in the missing persons unit from a guy named Ned, a nervous-sounding man who would not reveal his last name (as if they didn’t know who he was): “I’m aware that the police are looking to speak to me about a missing person, Carmen Rodriguez,” Ned said. He sounded timid, but also curious. Ned wanted to know what the Hartford PD had on him, or how far along in the investigation they were. Garcia could tell the only reason Ned had called was to fish for information.

  “We do want to talk to you,” Garcia said.

  “What can I do?”

  “You can come down here, for one.”

  They made arrangements for Ned to show up at the Hartford PD to speak with Garcia on October 19, three days later. Ned said he’d be there.

  61

  I

  Ned was forty-one years old—and once again the cops were on his back. After talking to Garcia, Ned sat down in his basement bedroom and decided that he had no future. Being on the road, visiting strangers’ houses, Ned had been in some of Connecticut’s most expensive homes. He’d pull into the driveway and sit for a moment, staring at mothers and daughters, sons and fathers, swing sets and pools, two cars and a dog and a white picket fence, and hated thinking that none of it would ever be his. He considered himself a huge disappointment to his parents, or “best friends.” The six-figure incomes he saw on credit applications his clients filled out turned his stomach. There were people ten years younger than him, he wrote to his parents that October night, living their lives in style and class: this ate at him.

  Although Ned wasn’t an Ivy Leaguer, here he was, a Rutgers grad, making 30K a year, if he was lucky. He lived in the basement of his parents’ home. He drove a secondhand car. Dressed in what felt like Goodwill clothing. And felt as though he’d be living at Mom and Dad’s in this same set of circumstances for another twenty years. In fact, he wrote, he never saw himself having a decent career…an apartment of [his] own, or a girlfriend. Never.

  Ned saw a sad life for himself. What a disappointment he was to his family. He could never show himself in New Jersey to his old friends. He was a disgrace. It depressed him when he thought about it. Just getting up in the morning, he insisted, and having to struggle through another day was a chore. He saw very little point in living anymore. What for? He had a tough time show
ing his emotions to anyone besides his parents.

  Sitting in his basement room on that Friday night in October, Ned decided to lay it all out in a letter to his parents. They were sleeping upstairs. He was at his desk writing. The television was on in the background, flickering. Pulsating. He paid no attention to it. He had other things on his mind. More important things. Life or death? He had a choice. He could end it right now.

  A rope and a rafter.

  A razor blade and a bathtub.

  A glass of water and a bottle of pills.

  The road to death didn’t matter. He just needed to get on it and go.

  In the letter, Ned said he loved “both” parents. He wrote he was sorry to do this to you. Looking at it optimistically, however, he suggested that it might turn out to be the best thing for everyone: This is the last time I can hurt you or disgrace the family.